Here is the continuation of a series of comparison tests that is without doubt bound to cause a huge amount of controversy: Workstation Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux There are performance wins and losses on both sides of the fence, but Ubuntu compares very well with Windows 7, and no doubt these tests indicate a much closer performance comparison than most people would have expected.

Responsiveness still sucks, try copying a few gigabytes of small files and watch Ubuntu Lucid lock up and become almost unusable. The problem is that there is no synergy between the kernel/X/GNOME/Nautilus so the IO Scheduler starves them of bandwidth. Switching to the deadline IO scheduler doesn't really help either.

Responsiveness still sucks, try copying a few gigabytes of small files and watch Ubuntu Lucid lock up and become almost unusable. The problem is that there is no synergy between the kernel/X/GNOME/Nautilus so the IO Scheduler starves them of bandwidth. Switching to the deadline IO scheduler doesn't really help either.

Would 3000 files of 1MB each suffice as test? Because copying that to an external usb drive while watching a HD movie seems to work fine.

The framerate drops a bit at times, but it's still watchable and the desktop remains responsive. Considering my crappy computer is already struggling to play HD movies alone (CPU around 90%) I don't think anything is really starving because of the copy process.